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Absolutely, I loved seeing spikes in my traffic and going to the reddit/HN thread that caused it. I guess you still can manually figure it out using a search en
by ehsankia 6y ago
Absolutely, I loved seeing spikes in my traffic and going to the reddit/HN thread that caused it. I guess you still can manually figure it out using a search engine maybe, but like you said the smaller weird ones will go under the cover probably.
- kevincox 6y agoExactly. I am torn on this feature. On one hand this is the correct default for privacy, there are a number of websites with somewhat sensitive information in the URL. But relying on a search engine or webmaster tools to crawl the entire web to see where your traffic is coming from is a real shame. Especially because it will have an inevitable delay.
- gscott 6y agoThe next step is not knowing where your visitors are coming from and having to only buy google ads rather then creating affiliate relationships. It is too bad FireFox is playing into this, it is not helping anyone's privacy. It only lines Google's pockets.
- Dylan16807 6y agoUsing and needing the exact url to form an affiliate relationship sounds like a very rare situation. And I don't know how you can say it doesn't help privacy with a straight face.
- gscott 6y agoIt makes total sense that you have a website but have no idea where people are coming from to get to it. Why know what is working for your website so that you can improve upon it?
- Dylan16807 6y agoNo idea?? You know the domain, which is usually enough by itself. And 99% of the time you can quickly search the domain to find what links to you.
- gscott 6y agoSo then there is no reason to remove most of the referrer. Because you have an ip address, url, and the ability to probably find the rest of the url. I would prefer to have the whole url and no ip address because a users ip address is useless to me while the url with the link on it is valuable. So they are taking away the wrong thing.
- Dylan16807 6y agoIt depends on how the site is laid out. Sometimes the url has information that shouldn't be shared, and truncating the url fixes that with very little downside. And it would be nice if IP addresses could be hidden but that's a very different topic.
- gscott 6y agoThen you would cut off the querystring. Removing the querystring would chop off any sessionID making it impossible to log back in.
- fragileone 6y agoAffiliates can still use things like personalised discount codes, script-based tracking, etc. There's still numerous ways for affiliates to exist.
- acdha 6y agoYou’ll still know the site sending traffic your way, but not the exact page or query. For most affiliates that’s fine and sites like HN could set the Referrer-Policy header to allow sending page-level details since they know that they don’t include anything sensitive. What the changed default does is mean that things fail safely when someone doesn’t think about this at all and builds a site with sensitive info in the URL. In that case, outbound link targets might receive things like usernames or email addresses, information in URL path components, etc. which isn’t intended to be public. Those sites are often poorly supported so the default changing means that the work shifts to a fraction of the web community which is best prepared to deal with the trivial extra work required to set a policy.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoIt is a fun feature, but privacy generally trumps such things since they are constantly being used by various entities for bad purposes.